Academic Heights: Richard J. Radke had to endure a bruising
process to get himself onto the first rung of
the tenure-track ladder.

Late one night, Richard J. Radke was at his desk,
putting together applications for faculty jobs. Nearing
the completion of his Ph.D., he was hoping to embark on
an academic career. A senior professor he knew well took
Radke aside and said, “I hate to tell you this, but it’s
going to be brutal,” he recalls. Radke, now an assistant
professor in electrical, computer, and systems
engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in
Troy, N.Y., admits that his professor was right. Even
once he’d landed a job, for the first few years he was
constantly busy and stressed out as he learned the ropes
and started worrying about tenure.

Roughly 28 percent of all electrical and computer
engineering Ph.D.s follow the academic career path,
according to a 2003 survey of doctoral recipients by the
U.S. National Science Foundation. After five or six
years as graduate students—a grueling stretch of time
spent in proving that they can develop their own ideas
and become well versed in research methods and
goals—freshly minted Ph.D.s find themselves at the
bottom rung of the academic ladder. Now their objectives
must be to prove themselves in their fields, contribute
to the learning in those fields, and in countries where
it is offered, get tenure.

It is the start of serious multitasking—simultaneously
writing research grant proposals, publishing journal and
conference papers, advising graduate students, teaching
multiple courses, and serving on school committees and
engineering organizations. As Radke points out, the
process can be very intimidating and stressful.

Typically, young academics in the United States start
out as assistant professors, become associate professors
if they get tenure, and may then be promoted to full
professors.

Tenure at most schools requires some combination of
research, teaching, and service on administrative
committees. Schools usually do not weigh the service
aspect as heavily as the others, and the emphasis on
teaching and research varies, based on the school.

At research institutions, the focus is, naturally
enough, on research. “If you’re an excellent researcher
and a so-so teacher, you’re okay,” says Russ Joseph, an
assistant professor in electrical engineering and
computer science at Northwestern University, in
Evanston, Ill. “If you’re a so-so researcher and an
excellent teacher, that’s not going to fly.”

Conversely, liberal arts institutions generally
emphasize teaching ability, although they do encourage
research. At Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, there
are no graduate students, but faculty members run
research labs with the help of talented undergraduate
researchers and funding from the college, says Associate
Professor Bruce Maxwell. Swarthmore also gives faculty
members a research sabbatical every four years, a leave
Maxwell is taking advantage of this year by working at a
small start-up company.

Institutions that focus predominantly on undergraduate
studies, such as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in
Terre Haute, Ind., usually make good teaching the top
qualification for tenure. At Rose-Hulman, there is no
pressure to write research proposals or to get funding,
says Mario Simoni, an assistant professor of electrical
and computer engineering, who chose the school because
he wanted to teach. “I enjoy interaction with students,
and I didn’t want to spend my time worrying about where
my next million dollars were going to come from,” he
says.

Just as a school’s emphasis can shape its tenure
requirements, its size can also affect who gets tenure.
The opinions of individuals on a tenure committee in a
smaller school can carry more weight than those in
larger schools and could lead to more subjective
decisions, Simoni says. On the other hand, there is a
greater chance that people on the tenure committee in
smaller schools are familiar with your research and
could judge you better, Maxwell says.

The exact issues that young academics face depend on
the school, but the pressure of the “tenure clock” is
always on their minds. The term refers to the time
period, six years or so, that young academics have to
secure tenure. After that, chances are they’ll find it
impossible to get tenure at all.

That time frame can have a negative effect. The
emphasis on research, for instance, can create undue
pressure to publish. “In some sense, I feel a little
guilty about being so driven about getting papers out,”
Radke says. “In the ideal sense of a scholar, you
shouldn’t be thinking about getting a paper out all the
time.”

Sometimes less is more. At the University of Michigan,
in Ann Arbor, Domitilla Del Vecchio, assistant professor
in electrical engineering and computer science, finds
there is less pressure to churn out papers, because
“they put a lot of stress on quality of publications
rather than on quantity.”

“A lot of publication occurs not because you have a
great new idea but [because] you have an idea in your
head that I need so many publications,” says Gill Pratt,
associate professor of electrical and computer
engineering at the Franklin W. Olin College of
Engineering, in Needham, Mass. Olin is taking an
entirely different approach to faculty development by
eliminating the tenure process completely. Instead, the
college gives faculty members five-year contracts that
are renewed based on teaching and research performance.

Pratt, who was previously an associate professor at
MIT, says that the key difference at Olin is that
faculty, besides conducting traditional research, are
encouraged to contribute to the field by participating
in government service, consulting, and founding start-up
companies. “Olin is recognizing that different people
don’t have to fit exactly the same mold,” Pratt says.
“We’re trying to show that entrepreneurship along with
research can exist together.”

Apart from the entrepreneurship principle, Olin’s
system is similar to that in the United Kingdom, where
reforms in the 1980s abolished tenure. British academics
hold fixed-term appointments and are reevaluated at the
end of the term, which can lead to their losing their
positions. Tenure also does not exist in Japan, India,
China, and other Asian countries, but although there are
no guarantees, a full-time academic job in these
countries is usually a permanent position.

The system varies widely in Europe. In most countries,
including France, Germany, and Italy, only senior
academics are appointed professors, a venerable, tenured
position. Junior faculty members, typically called
lecturers, can have fixed-term or permanent contracts,
but they usually do not move up the ranks at the same
university.

A key difference is that European countries give
preference to older, more experienced people, says the
Italian-born Del Vecchio, who is familiar with the
European academic system. After earning their Ph.D.s,
people commonly get postdocs, temporary positions to
gain additional teaching and research experience,
instead of being hired as assistant professors, she
adds. In the United States, postdocs are a norm in
science disciplines such as biology and physics but are
uncommon for engineers; the NSF survey shows that
electrical engineers make up only 0.5 percent of all
postdocs.

The U.S. tenure process is considered a way to judge a
new academic’s potential and weed out weaker candidates.
But Olin’s Pratt argues that it is not the only way.
Contrary to what some believe, the absence of a tenure
system only makes him work harder, he says, because of
the freedom to be creative, develop new courses, think
about fresh ways to teach the same concepts, and consult
with the industry and develop new products. “One of the
fallacies of the tenure system is that if there weren’t
hoops to jump through, faculty would sit around and have
coffee all day long,” he says. “[Here] folks create
their own hoops to jump through.”

But others believe that tenure drives the bar up for
quality. Radke says that the tenure clock pushes him to
do more and makes him a better researcher. According to
Michael Flynn, associate professor of electrical
engineering and computer science at the University of
Michigan, “The tenure process is one of the reasons that
the U.S. has the best schools in the world.”
Northwestern’s Joseph believes that the job security
that comes with tenure gives academics freedom to voice
their opinions and to perform high-risk, high-reward
research as well as teaching.

Whether or not people spend their time as assistant
professors stressing about getting tenure, Radke
believes they clearly love what they are doing if they
have chosen academic careers, especially in engineering.
Unlike such other fields as liberal arts and social
sciences, it is much easier to get a high-paying
private-sector job in the technology field, he says.
Like other academics, he chose the career for the
freedom of pursuing research that interests him and for
the rewards of teaching. “There is nothing like the
academic lifestyle for flexibility,” he says. “No one is
watching over my shoulder to see when I’m in the
office.”